While ethnographers and the data they produce already play a role in affecting industry practices, there is potential to integrate anthropological ways of seeing and knowing into a shared transdisciplinary...
Tag: epistemology
Beyond Representation: Using Infrastructure Studies to Reframe Ethnographic Agendas and Outcomes
The ethos and methods of participatory research have been widely embraced as a powerful approach to address systemic inequity in the design of technology. While there have been many gains and developments that...
How a Government Organisation Evolved to Embrace Ethnographic Methods for Service (and Team) Resilience: The Case of the Canadian Digital Service
Government websites and online services are often built with limited input from the people they serve. This approach limits their ability to respond to ever changing needs and contexts. This case study describes...
Cooperation without Submission: Some Insights on Knowing, Not-Knowing and Their Relations from Hopi-US Engagements
EPIC2018 Keynote Address Introduction The headlines of the March 6, 1886 edition of the Illustrated Police News, read “Cowed by a Woman: A Craven Red Villain Weakens in the Face of a Resolute White Heroine—Exciting Adventure in an Indian Village in Arizona.” The lede was accompanied by this...
Human-Centered Data Science: A New Paradigm for Industrial IoT
Few professions appear more at odds, at least on the surface, than ethnography and data science. The first deals in qualitative “truths,” gleaned by human researchers, based on careful, deep observation of only a small number of human subjects, typically. The latter deals in quantitative “truths,”...
Framed by Experience: From User Experience to Strategic Incitement
Ethnographic and other related practices in industry focus – for a variety of historical reasons – primarily on studying the experiences of individuals/institutions as consumers/users. We suggest that this framing limits our work to descriptive forms of knowledge, and renders invisible larger...
Who and What Drives Algorithm Development: Ethnographic Study of AI Start-up Organizational Formation
The focus of this paper is to investigate deep learning algorithm development in an early stage start-up in which edges of knowledge formation and organizational formation were unsettled and contested. We use a debate by anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss to examine these...
The Climate Crisis as Learning Space
It is becoming widely accepted that the climate crisis is a multiscale breakdown of interrelated ecological systems, caused by behavioural patterns that are unsustainable. As behaviours are largely informed by ideologies and as the latter are passed on by education, we submit that the climate...
The Conceit of Oracles
Good morning, I am really excited to be here for my first EPIC conference. There are just so many amazing people in the audience as I look at you guys, and so many of you guys I've been following on blogs and Twitter and especially Natalie Hanson’s anthrodesign listserv. I can’t wait to talk to...
If These Walls Could Talk: The Mental Life of the Built Environment
Renewing Henri Lefebvre’s unfinished and overlooked science of ‘rhythmanalysis,’ I propose physical space becomes meaningful to us to the extent that it provides refuge from the ravages of time—specifically, the intersecting rhythms of everyday life. In other words, we develop affinity with space...